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    plexing manner in which be has delivered his statement may still indirectly be productive of much good , although Weed , in order to its attainment , much accurate investigation and renewed examination on hoth sides Will be unquestionably indispensable . You will have already perceived ( and indeed you were before aware ) , that I am not one of those Germans who have

    received this English work with a mere tissue of revilings , with renewed expressions of self-approbation , altogether mistaking the ( as I do not doubt ) excellent and Christian disposition of its author . Very different are the thoughts to which it has given rise in myself ; the most essential of these I will endeavour briefly to lay before you .

    First , then , I would remark the erroneousness and injustice of the imputation , that the Protestant churches of Germany , founded as they were on the authority of Holy Scripture , at the same time permitted any one of their ministers and teachers to vary from it even in their public instruction as far and as often as they pleased . * At no place and at no time was such the case . The Protestant churches of Germany have founded their public mm . . _ _ _ _ V _ _ _ _ _ _ ^ V

    teaching and observances on confessions of faith , which their abandonment of unchristian errors compelled them to frame ; and in these scriptural " confessions" themselves , were marked out the limits , beyond which the liberty of their ministers was not to be extended . It was unavoidable and it was right , that the period in which an undue value was attached to the letter of these confessions , should be followed by another , in which a distinction should be made between that which

    constitutes their essential import , ( to meet each error by the positive statement of the opposed truth , ) and that which in the form of expression originated solely in the then state of doctrinal science ; nor did this in any way destroy the right and duty to bind down the public teacher to the matter of the confession ; nor did the conduct of individuals who , in literary controversy , when this difference had been perceived , spoke slightingly of the value of the confessions generally , by any means imply any renunciation of them on the confessions generally , by any means imply any renunciation of them on

    the part of the church . This , I repeat , never happened ; and if ecclesiastical authorities , in times of an innovating boldness of teaching , did allow the reins to pass too much from their hands , and occasionally permitted the liberty conceded to their teachers to be unworthily abused , still this was only a transient , although great , error of ecclesiastical jurisdiction . But the church never abandoned aught of its rights , nor does their conduct establish any absurdity in the fundamental principles of the Protestant churches .

    Would it be a fair and iust inference , if from the cases in the English Episcopal Church in which unprincipled clergy were for years continued in their functions to the spiritual detriment of their cure , one were to attribute to the church the disgraceful inconsistency , that , while she appointed the clergy for the edification of their charge , she at the same time permitted them to give offence by their unchristian life ? If Mr . R . will not allow this , but ascribes it to the deficiencies of individual spiritual authorities , how can he charge the Protestant churches in Germany with inconsistency ?

    Closely connected with this confusion of the errors in the functionaries with the principles of the church , is the too great value which Mr . R . attaches to the preventive means for those evils which he observed in Germany . The English Episcopal Church may glory and rejoice in the character of her XXXIX Articles ; she may from her point of view give them the preference over those longer formulae which had their origin in

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    Professor Sack's View of Religion in Germany . 523

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1828, page 523, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2563/page/11/